Let’s get straight into it!

For those of you who watch the online auction market as closely as I do, you may have noticed an awful lot of Hagerty auctions appearing this week. And there’s a reason for it.

Hagerty is currently hosting Part 2 of the Generous Collection, with more than 250 cars being offered throughout August, every single one at no reserve. Hagerty says the collection was born from its owner's lifelong passion for cars and desire to support his Alabama community, with the cars now emerging after years of what they describe as "long-term silent storage."

I'll let the video below show you the cars because there's quite frankly too much there for me to even begin picking through here. What really caught my attention was something else.

Hagerty is running more than 50 auctions a day this week.

I look at the numbers across all the online platforms every day, and that volume is enough to make Hagerty effectively the second-busiest platform in the entire online auction market this week, congrats!

That's not something I get to write very often. It's also easy to forget what goes on behind the scenes when you see a page filled with auctions. More than 50 cars ending every day means more than 50 listings that had to be put together, photographs organized, sellers dealt with, questions and comments handled and then, because every one of these is no reserve, a lot of transactions to deal with afterwards.

Then they do it all again the next day. I've said before that I think Hagerty does a fantastic job when it comes to bringing entire collections online, and this is probably one of the best examples of it. They're not normally competing with the biggest platforms on sheer daily volume, nor do I think they necessarily need to. But bring in a collection of this size and suddenly, for a week, they're right up there.

And I quite like the way they're doing it. There are expensive cars, cheap cars, projects, old Cadillacs, pickups, hot rods and all sorts of wonderfully random things mixed together. Some have been sitting for years and undoubtedly need plenty of work. But there isn't a reserve sitting underneath any of them waiting to spoil the fun.

More than 250 cars are coming out of storage and they're going to sell for whatever the market decides they're worth.

That's the sort of auction I can happily waste far too much time scrolling through.

A few days ago, Vroomer Bob B sent me something completely unprompted that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole.

Bob has been watching Ferrari 488s and felt like he'd suddenly started seeing them everywhere. Rather than just assuming he was right, he went through Bring a Trailer himself and compared every 488 offered between March 1 and August 27 this year with exactly the same period last year. Here’s the stats he shared with me.

That's quite a change. Fourteen 488s became 29. Seven Spiders became 17. One Pista became seven.

We checked Bob's numbers against our own data and, on the sold cars, he was absolutely spot on.

His explanation was pretty simple: prices went up, owners noticed and sellers came out of the woodwork.

I think he's right. But I also think there's a much more interesting story behind how those prices got there in the first place.

We've seen some enormous Ferrari results at the live auctions recently, and I've written before about how different a live auction room can be from watching a timer count down on your laptop. Get two very wealthy people in the same room who both decide they're going home with a particular car and rational pricing can disappear remarkably quickly.

One big result then becomes public. Every owner of a similar car sees it. Every dealer sees it. Every auction house sees it. And suddenly the market has a new number.

That doesn't necessarily mean the whole market has moved to that number. It means one buyer paid it once.

But sellers don't tend to wait around to find out, and Bob's table rather beautifully shows what can happen next. Prices rise and suddenly the cars appear.

But where do all the buyers come from? This, for me, is the more interesting question.

There were 14 488s offered on BaT during Bob's six-month period last year and 29 this year. Higher prices can quite easily create another 15 sellers.

Can they create another 15 buyers? I'm not so sure. And Bob actually mentioned something else when he sent me the numbers. More recently, he feels like 488 prices have started to moderate, perhaps even soften a little.

So naturally, we went back into the data.

Now, if I wanted a dramatic headline, I could tell you the median has fallen from $475,000 in July to $367,501 in August and Bob has already been proved right.

I'm not going to do that 😄

July's three regular GTB/Spider sales were all Spiders. August had a different mix, while its overall number also includes two Pistas at $917,500 and $1.12 million. Strip the Pistas and Challenge cars away and we're left with just three regular GTB/Spider sales in each month.

That's nowhere near enough for me to tell you confidently that the market is falling. But Bob's theory makes sense.

If a few exceptional results dragged sellers into the market faster than new buyers arrived, eventually something has to give. Maybe prices soften. Maybe reserves don't get met. Maybe cars take longer to sell. Or perhaps the very best examples continue doing incredibly well while everything underneath becomes harder to move.

And there's something else I've been watching. Did the cars actually sell?

We've touched on this theme a few times before in TDV.

I've seen 488s and plenty of other expensive cars, apparently close successfully on auction platforms only for the transaction seemingly never to happen and the car to surface again.

There can obviously be completely innocent explanations. Buyers disappear. Financing doesn't happen. Something comes up during due diligence. Sellers change their minds.

But if we're using auction results to decide what a market is worth, it matters.

A $450,000 winning bid that never becomes a $450,000 transaction isn't quite the same piece of evidence as a car that changes hands and disappears into someone's garage.

Which brings me to the slightly less comfortable part of all this. Can a thin market influence itself?

I've raised this before, and I'm going to be very clear that I'm not accusing anyone involved with any particular 488 sale of doing anything improper.

But think about the economics. If somebody owns several examples of a relatively thinly traded collector car, one very public sale at an enormous number could theoretically increase the perceived value of every other one they own.

You don't need hundreds of transactions to move the apparent market because there aren't hundreds of transactions. One exceptional result might be completely genuine. Two people desperately wanted the same car and one was prepared to pay more than everyone else.

But that result then becomes a comp. Sellers quote it. Auction houses quote it. Buyers see it. Databases ingest it. Other owners decide now might be the time to sell.

The comp starts influencing the market that the comp is supposedly measuring.

And I find that fascinating. Maybe Bob's table is showing us the next stage of exactly that process. The big results happened. Sellers responded. Supply more than doubled.

Now we find out whether the buyers agree. If Bob is right and prices are beginning to moderate, perhaps that's simply the market doing what markets eventually do, testing whether the new price was actually real.

I don't think we have the answer yet. But I'm going to keep watching the 488 because I suspect the next few months will tell us far more than the last few.

And Bob's email has also given me another idea. This entire story started because one Vroomer asked a question about one particular car. We went into the auction data, compared it with last year, looked at supply, prices, variants and what might actually be happening underneath the headline numbers.

We can do that with other cars too. So rather than me deciding what you want, I'm asking you.

It's now been five days since we let you all loose on GoAskSam, and I've learnt considerably more in those five days than I expected.

You found cars Sam didn't think existed, somehow convinced him that Cobra was a car manufacturer, discovered that none of us had bothered to look at the site in dark mode and, rather less amusingly, helped us uncover a bug that was quietly swallowing a couple of seller introductions.

But you've also started changing what we're building. Some of the things you've searched for surprised me, the way you've used Sam has surprised me, and we've already had companies in the industry getting in touch that I certainly wasn't expecting to hear from five days in.

I ended up writing a little about the experience on LinkedIn, because I think there's a lesson in there that goes well beyond GoAskSam.

Read what happened after we hit launch → A year of planning. Five days live. The five days won.